PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Jaybird180 on April 19, 2018, 07:56:27 PM
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https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/supreme-court-gives-police-green-light-shoot
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SEVEN of the nine Justices voted in favor of this decision, so it will be very hard to hang republicans, Trump, or racism for it.
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The ACLU is clearly biased to the point of outright lying.
From the opening paragraph of the case:https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-467_bqm1.pdf (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-467_bqm1.pdf)
Petitioner Andrew Kisela, a police officer in Tucson, Arizona, shot respondent Amy Hughes. Kisela and two other officers had arrived on the scene after hearing a police radio report that a woman was engaging in erratic behavior with a knife. They had been there but a few minutes, perhaps just a minute. When Kisela fired, Hughes was holding a large kitchen knife, had taken steps toward another woman standing nearby, and had refused to drop the knife after at least two commands to do so. The question is whether at the time of the shooting Kisela’s actions violated clearly established law.
Between this factual statement and what the ACLU wrote, it is not clear to me that we are talking about the same case. They have blatantly distorted facts in order to twist support for their side. Lying has no place in what they do.
An officer ordered a woman to drop a knife. She didn't then made a move toward someone else nearby. The woman was shot. My question is why wasn't this 9-0?
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The ACLU is clearly biased to the point of outright lying.
From the opening paragraph of the case:https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-467_bqm1.pdf (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-467_bqm1.pdf)
Between this factual statement and what the ACLU wrote, it is not clear to me that we are talking about the same case. They have blatantly distorted facts in order to twist support for their side. Lying has no place in what they do.
An officer ordered a woman to drop a knife. She didn't then made a move toward someone else nearby. The woman was shot. My question is why wasn't this 9-0?
Thank you with much gratitude for your due diligence. This disparity has caused me to revisit the notion that motives color communication. I read through at least the 5th page and am deeply disappointed at the ACLUs spin on the case. However, I am interested in reading the dissenting opinion.
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I think this was the wrong case to hang the 4th amendment on. There are far more egregious cases than this for accountability of the po-po. Strangely, I agree with Sotomayer as to the unbalance of rights of citizens, vs the qualified immunity of the police. However, this is not the case on which the change in law should be concerned.
There is a case from around 2010 where the police performed an illegal search. They knew at the time the search was illegal, they did it anyway, and the results of the illegal search were still used as evidence. The ruling was; 'even though the cops made an illegal search, and even though they violated the defendants 4th amendment rights, and even though they knew at the time the search was illegal, the proceeds of the search would have been found had the proper civil rights been observed, so - search results were allowed to stand'. It was some of the most convoluted logic ever written, and it is still case law on the books.
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Hard cases make bad law. The particulars I've seen on this make it far less cut and dried than anyone wants to admit.
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Hard cases make bad law. The particulars I've seen on this make it far less cut and dried than anyone wants to admit.
Explain?
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Explain?
What I've read is that the woman with the knife, in addition to not responding to the officer's demands, approached another woman, which is when the officer opened fire. It is therefore quite possible the the officer was simply trying to protect an innocent from someone with a deadly weapon, something for which I have a hard time making said officer culpable.
Do keep in mind that I am emphasizing "what I read". Sad thing is such incidents tend to get distorted in the light of the media, so I admit my facts may be in error. I do find it somewhat incredulous that an LEO would just haul off and shoot someone who was just standing there with a knife.
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I'm reading the dissenting opinion now. It starts on pg.9 of the majority opinion. In part it reads:
The record, properly construed at this stage, shows that at the time of the shooting: Hughes stood stationary about six feet away from Chadwick, appeared“ composed and content,” Appellant’s Excerpts of Record 109 (Record), and held a kitchen knife down at her side with the blade facing away from Chadwick. Hughes was nowhere near the officers, had committed no illegal act, was suspected of no crime, and did not raise the knife in the direction of Chadwick or anyone else. Faced with these facts, the two other responding officers held their fire, and one testified that he “wanted to continue trying verbal command(s) and see if that would work.” Id., at
120. But not Kisela. He thought it necessary to use deadly force, and so, without giving a warning that he would open fire, he shot Hughes four times, leaving her seriously injured.
If this account of Kisela’s conduct sounds unreasonable, that is because it was.
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The last part is especially interesting
This unwarranted summary reversal is symptomatic of “a disturbing trend regarding the use of this Court’s resources” in qualified-immunity cases. Salazar-Limon v. Houston, 581 U. S. ___, ___ (2017) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 8). As I have previously noted, this Court routinely displays an unflinching willingness “to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity” but “rarely intervene(s) where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases.” Id., at ___–___ (slip op., at 8 - 9); see also Baude, Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful? 106 Cal. L. Rev.45, 82 (2018) (“[N]early all of the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity cases come out the same way—by finding immunity for the officials”); Reinhardt, The Demise of Habeas Corpus and the Rise of Qualified Immunity: The Court’s Ever Increasing Limitations on the Development Cite as: 584 U. S. ____ (2018) 15 SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
and Enforcement of Constitutional Rights and Some Particularly Unfortunate Consequences, 113 Mich. L. Rev. 1219, 1244–1250 (2015). Such a one-sided approach to qualified immunity transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment.
The majority today exacerbates that troubling asymmetry. Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished. Because there is nothing right or just under the law about this, I respectfully dissent.
Emphasis mine.
I tried as best I could to preserve breaks and sentence structure but may have made a few errors
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After reading through the dissenting opinion, I have to part ways with my previous statement that was in agreement with bflynn. I think the majority opinion is twisting the law to erode Individual Rights and Place them as subjects the State.
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After reading through the dissenting opinion, I have to part ways with my previous statement that was in agreement with bflynn. I think the majority opinion is twisting the law to erode Individual Rights and Place them as subjects the State.
You have it almost correct. The wording of the majority opinion tries(and fails) to read like an equal treatment for all. However, it is setting up a class society where some pigs are a bit more equal than others. (see what I did there?)
In an inverse from the norm, a badge and a gun in the US now yield greater power and yet LESS responsibility. In most normalized situations of human regulation the greater the power, the greater the responsibility. The courts have been setting this norm on its ear now since the Rodney King beating verdict(and ever earlier, but that seems to be the catalyst or trigger point).
The civil rights movement of the 60s tried to balance things out, but sadly there were no teeth to the legislation. Currently there is no punishment for violations of civil rights except in very rare cases, and most of those are reduced to civil penalties, and fines which are not paid by the violator, but by his/her employer(muni, county, state, fedguv) which are of course, tax funded. Another oxymoron.